31 Friday Jan 2014
Posted in 1800s, American, Dickinson (Emily), Poetry
Before the ice is in the pools—
Emily Dickinson
[1858]
Before the skaters go,
Or any check at nightfall
Is tarnished by the snow—
Before the fields have finished—
Before the Christmas tree,
Wonder upon wonder—
Will arrive to me!
What we touch the hems of
On a summer’s day—
What is only walking
Just a bridge away—
That which sings so—speaks so—
When there’s no one here—
Will the frock I wept in
Answer me to wear?
*
30 Thursday Jan 2014
Posted in 1900s, American, Poetry, Sassoon (Siegfried)
The Redeemer
by Siegfried Sassoon
[from The Old Huntsman and Other Poems, 1918]
Darkness: the rain sluiced down; the mire was deep;
It was past twelve on a mid-winter night,
When peaceful folk in beds lay snug asleep;
There, with much work to do before the light,
We lugged our clay-sucked boots as best we might
Along the trench; sometimes a bullet sang,
And droning shells burst with a hollow bang;
We were soaked, chilled and wretched, every one;
Darkness; the distant wink of a huge gun.
I turned in the black ditch, loathing the storm;
A rocket fizzed and burned with blanching flare,
And lit the face of what had been a form
Floundering in mirk. He stood before me there;
I say that He was Christ; stiff in the glare,
And leaning forward from His burdening task,
Both arms supporting it; His eyes on mine
Stared from the woeful head that seemed a mask
Of mortal pain in Hell’s unholy shine.
No thorny crown, only a woollen cap
He wore—an English soldier, white and strong,
Who loved his time like any simple chap,
Good days of work and sport and homely song;
Now he has learned that nights are very long,
And dawn a watching of the windowed sky.
But to the end, unjudging, he’ll endure
Horror and pain, not uncontent to die
That Lancaster on Lune may stand secure.
He faced me, reeling in his weariness,
Shouldering his load of planks, so hard to bear.
I say that He was Christ, who wrought to bless
All groping things with freedom bright as air,
And with His mercy washed and made them fair.
Then the flame sank, and all grew black as pitch,
While we began to struggle along the ditch;
And someone flung his burden in the muck,
Mumbling: ‘O Christ Almighty, now I’m stuck!’
29 Wednesday Jan 2014
Posted in 2000s, American, Benitez (Sandy Sue), Crisis Chronicles Press, Poetry
Angel
for Sophia Rose
The Labor & Delivery room was typical:
institutional white, stark, and bleach
clean. My heavy heart sank deeper
into the mattress as I thought of my baby.
Weightless. Lost. Floating in my womb
like a ghost ship in the Bermuda Triangle.
The umbilical cord a lifeline between her
and the promise of life. Of rescue.
But the SOS came too late. Where there was
once a sea of amniotic fluid, there was now
an empty cavern. The nurse told me in a
whisper, after the doctor left with silence
in his pocket, that he saw two little feet.
Dangling. Suspended with nothing to hold on
to. I had always believed in angels. Just
never thought I would hold one in my arms.
Watch her tiny chest flutter one last time.
* * * * *
This poem originally appeared in Mad Swirl. It was included in Angel, a chapbook of poetry by Sandy Sue Benitez published in 2012 by Crisis Chronicles Press.
Sandy Sue Benitez is the author of Ever Violet, a full-length collection of poetry (D-N Publishing, 2007). She has authored four previous chapbooks: Beneath a Black Pearl Sky (Flutter Press, 2009), The Lollipop Club (Victorian Violet Press, 2010), Petal Storm (Flutter Press, 2010), and Postcards from Iraq (Books on Blogs, 2011). Sandy’s work also appears in two anthologies: Lilith: A Collection of Women’s Writes and Postcards from Eve, (both Fortunate Childe Publications). She is also the Founder & Editor of Flutter Poetry Journal and Flutter Press. Sandy’s poetry has appeared in over 130 print and online poetry journals since 2006. She resides in the Inland Empire, California, with her husband and their 2 children.
Angel cover photo by Kim Newberg
28 Tuesday Jan 2014
Posted in 2000s, American, Cleveland, Crisis Chronicles Press, Poetry, Washington (R.A)
RA Washington at The Lit in Cleveland – photo by JB
MOLOCH, MOLOCH
For Allen Ginsberg
This was not a generation
It was a genocide.
My corpses piled along internet apathy
Or strewn toward ghosts. The angry children
Fear and pose, play pasts to passive
Flick flowers, grave are you.
The postage stamp heroes we will not be.
This is no generation
For we alarm their shaking jowls
Rooted magic, napalm inside me.
Me for you
Me, this flinging and failing
Me, general of boys who weep gutters
Me, of women who sing at their stolen hoods
Clits singed proper, skirts up.
The money is looking
Me, of stark hovels, the conforming comfort.
Me, broken vows, the worthy say so.
This was no generation
Leaders lobby to stay lobbied
The dope flows, secrets uttered obscene.
Homo, bitch, nigg (with the A)
Before we war ourselves silly trumpets
Cow bells and awkward phrasing
Tweet twit bewitched for inching despair.
Path so disease the puss ooze out in Vogue.
Nights of prayers
People who love too much, shoved just enough
Go, vita
Go, street
Go, ape
Shitting dawn and no care
Go, Jesus
Go, life
So fuck your womb we know better.
Go, cynic
Go, lists
Go, for goods hatched in distraction
Go, pummel, yes, pummel
For we drag our dicks like clubs, and ambition.
Go, modern
Go, fleets of madness, we all must be.
This is no generation.
Still wishing sit ins matter
Taking riot gear as holy shroud
You, for the well we must keep
You, for the passive rebelling
You, amongst fear, so silent
The violin without strings
You, must be lying
Off alone, left out.
Leftist pleading mercy from wolves
Hail of Marys
Who kept to saying their real names
We men, yelling, bend over, bend over over
Love is lust
So the nut is empty
As workers wallets and your belief
All eyes are pennies, their guts in the street
Taken as litter, and ash trays
You, muse of beer
Neglect as poignant as the news
We might be killing ourselves
No, frank ohara or Sinatra
No, Charles
No talking assholes
Wait – yes, talking assholes
No allen, no jack
No patti, or leroi
Just the forgetting the hettie amongst us now.
No power, black or white
That was them. Them dead. Boomers Florida now.
No deaths to martyr
Malcolm, martin
No bobby, but there is a Jackson and we decided to mourn him.
Or mother, or daddi
Jimi angels all.
This is no generation
This is a forgetting, in place of pasts
Jostling for an us
Amongst fables.
* * * * * * * *
Ra Washington Is a writer living and working on Cleveland’s west side with his wife, historian Lyz Bly. He is the author of 24 books – most recently the novel, Run Along, The FIRE Says – and he operates the bookstore/zine cooperative, Guide To Kulchur, in the Historic Detroit Shoreway neighborhood. He also curates the electronic music label Cleveland Tapes. You can find him on twitter @clevelandtapes.
“Moloch, Moloch” (c) 2012 by RA Washington, used with permission. The poem originally appeared in his book Primer for the Vanguard Youth, published by Crisis Chronicles Press.
Primer for the Vanguard Youth – cover photo by Steven B Smith
27 Monday Jan 2014
Posted in 2000s, American, Colby (Joan), Poetry
Don’t Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She was a finalist in the GSU Poetry Contest (2007), Nimrod International Pablo Neruda Prize (2009, 2012), and received honorable mentions in the North American Review‘s James Hearst Poetry Contest (2008, 2010). She is the editor of Illinois Racing News,and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers, The Atrocity Book and her newest book from Future Cycle Press—Dead Horses. FutureCycle has just published her Selected Poems. A chapbook, Bittersweet, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Press next winter.
Walk under the moon’s umbrella,
Play tic tac toe with dreams,
Spit in the empty birdbath,
Disguise yourself as a mannequin,
Visit the cemetery of rascals,
Eat scallions in the afternoon,
Give flowers, except to the living,
Embroider the sheets of charity,
Hunker down when the troubles unroll,
Believe in fate’s mercurial clock,
Wear the hat of a profiteer,
Write a check to a bounty hunter,
Burn the book of memory,
Take a child to the hidden wood,
Slave in the mines like a blind mule,
Sing when it’s starless,
Dance to a forlorn tune,
Put on the gloves of industry,
Tell the story again and again,
Take hostage the souvenir of sadness,
Live like a bombardier
Armed and above it all.
* * * * * *
26 Sunday Jan 2014
Posted in 2000s, American, Dauber (C.O), Poetry
24 Friday Jan 2014
Posted in 1900s, American, Essays, Mencken (H.L), Poetry
As I say, the movement shows signs of having spent its strength. The mere bulk of the verse that it produces is a great deal less than it was three or four years ago, or even one or two years ago, and there is a noticeable tendency toward the conservatism once so loftily disdained. I daresay the Knish-Morgan burlesque of Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke was a hard blow to the more fantastic radicals. At all events, they subsided after it was perpetrated, and for a couple of years nothing has been heard from them. These radicals, chiefly collected in what was called the “Others” group, rattled the slapstick in a sort of side-show to the main exhibition. They attracted, of course, all the more credulous and uninformed partisans of the movement, and not a few advanced professors out of one-building universities began to lecture upon them before bucolic women’s clubs. They committed hari-kari in the end by beginning to believe in their own buncombe. When their leaders took to the chautauquas and sought to convince the peasantry that James Whitcomb Riley was a fraud the time was ripe for the lethal buffoonery of MM. Bynner and Ficke. That buffoonery was enormously successful – perhaps the best hoax in American literary history. It was swallowed, indeed, by so many magnificoes that it made criticism very timorous thereafter, and so did damage to not a few quite honest bards. To-day a new poet, if he departs ever so little from the path already beaten, is kept in a sort of literary delousing pen until it is established that he is genuinely sincere, and not merely another Bynner in hempen whiskers and a cloak to go invisible.
Well, what is the net produce of the whole uproar? How much actual poetry have all these truculent rebels against Stedman’s Anthology and McGuffey’s Sixth Reader manufactured? I suppose I have read nearly all of it – a great deal of it, as a magazine editor, in manuscript – and yet, as I look back, my memory is lighted up by very few flashes of any lasting brilliance. The best of all the lutists of the new school, I am inclined to think, are Carl Sandburg and James Oppenheim, and particularly Sandburg. He shows a great deal of raucous crudity, he is often a bit uncertain and wobbly, and sometimes he is downright banal – but, taking one bard with another, he is probably the soundest and most intriguing of the lot. Compare, for example, his war poems – simple, eloquent and extraordinarily moving – to the humorless balderdash of Amy Lowell, or, to go outside the movement, to the childish gush of Joyce Kilmer, Hermann Hagedorn and Charles Hanson Towne. Often he gets memorable effects by astonishingly austere means, as in his famous “Chicago” rhapsody and his “Cool Tombs.” And always he is thoroughly individual, a true original, his own man. Oppenheim, equally eloquent, is more conventional. He stands, as to one leg, on the shoulders of Walt Whitman, and, as to the other, on a stack of Old Testaments. The stuff he writes, despite his belief to the contrary, is not American at all; it is absolutely Jewish, Levantine, almost Asiatic. But here is something criticism too often forgets: the Jew, intrinsically, is the greatest of poets. Beside his gorgeous rhapsodies the highest flights of any western bard seem feeble and cerebral. Oppenheim, inhabiting a brick house in New York, manages to get that sonorous Eastern note into his dithyrambs. They are often inchoate and feverish, but at their best they have the gigantic gusto of Solomon’s Song.
Miss Lowell is the schoolmarm of the movement, and vastly more the pedagogue than the artist. She has written perhaps half a dozen excellent pieces in imitation of Richard Aldington and John Gould Fletcher, and a great deal of highfalutin bathos. Her “A Dome of Many-Colored Glass” is full of infantile poppycock, and though it is true that it was first printed in 1912, before she joined the Imagists, it is not to be forgotten that it was reprinted with her consent in 1915, after she had definitely set up shop as a foe of the cliché. Her celebrity, I fancy, is largely extra-poetical; if she were Miss Tilly Jones, of Fort Smith, Ark., there would be a great deal less rowing about her, and her successive masterpieces would be received less gravely. A literary craftsman in America, as I have already said once or twice, is never judged by his work alone. Miss Lowell has been helped very much by her excellent social position. The majority, and perhaps fully nine-tenths of the revolutionary poets are of no social position at all – newspaper reporters, Jews, foreigners of vague nationality, school teachers, lawyers, advertisement writers, itinerant lecturers, Greenwich Village posturers, and so on. I have a suspicion that it has subtly flattered such denizens of the demi-monde to find the sister of a president of Harvard in their midst, and that their delight has materially corrupted their faculties. Miss Lowell’s book of exposition, “Tendencies in Modern American Poetry,” is commonplace to the last degree. Louis Untermeyer’s “The New Era in American Poetry” is very much better. And so is Prof. Dr. John Livingston Lowes’ “Convention and Revolt in Poetry.”
As for Edgar Lee Masters, for a short season the undisputed Homer of the movement, I believe that he is already extinct. What made the fame of “The Spoon River Anthology” was not chiefly any great show of novelty in it, nor any extraordinary poignancy, nor any grim truthfulness unparalleled, but simply the public notion that it was improper. It fell upon the country at the height of the last sex wave – a wave eternally ebbing and flowing, now high, now low. It was read, not as work of art, but as document; its large circulation was undoubtedly mainly among persons to whom poetry qua poetry was as sour a dose as symphonic music. To such persons, of course, it seemed something new under the sun. They were unacquainted with the verse of George Crabbe; they were quite innocent of E. A. Robinson and Robert Frost; they knew nothing of the Ubi sunt formula; they had never heard of the Greek Anthology. The roar of his popular success won Masters’ case with the critics. His undoubted merits in detail – his half-wistful cynicism, his capacity for evoking simple emotions, his deft skill at managing the puny difficulties of vers libre – were thereupon pumped up to such an extent that his defects were lost sight of. Those defects, however, shine blindingly in his later books. Without the advantage of content that went with the anthology, they reveal themselves as volumes of empty doggerel, with now and then a brief moment of illumination. It would be difficult, indeed, to find poetry that is, in essence, less poetical. Most of the pieces are actually tracts, and many of them are very bad tracts.
Lindsay? Alas, he has done his own burlesque. What was new in him, at the start, was an echo of the barbaric rhythms of the Jubilee Songs. But very soon the thing ceased to be a marvel, and of late his elephantine college yells have ceased to be amusing. His retirement to the chautauquas is self-criticism of uncommon penetration. Frost? A standard New England poet, with a few changes in phraseology, and the substitution of sour resignationism for sweet resignationism. Whittier without the whiskers. Robinson? Ditto, but with a politer bow. He has written sound poetry, but not much of it. The late Major-General Roosevelt ruined him by praising him, as he ruined Henry Bordeaux, Pastor Wagner, Francis Warrington Dawson and many another. Giovannitti? A forth-rate Sandburg. Ezra Pound? The American in headlong flight from America – to England, to Italy, to the Middle Ages, to ancient Greece, to Cathay and points East. Pound, it seems to me, is the most picturesque man in the whole movement – a professor turned fantee, Abelard in grand opera. His knowledge is abysmal; he has it readily on tap; moreover, he has a fine ear, and has written many an excellent verse. But now all the glow and gusto of the bard have been transformed into the rage of the pamphleteer: he drops the lute for the bayonet. One sympathizes with him in his choler. The stupidity he combats is actually almost unbearable. Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. But this business, alas, is fatal to the placid moods and fine other-worldliness of the poet. Pound gives a thrilling show, but – …. The remaining stars of the liberation need not detain us. They are the streetboys following the calliope. They have labored with diligence, but they have produced no poetry….
Miss Monroe, if she would write a book about it, would be the most competent historian of the movement, and perhaps also its keenest critic. She has seen it from the inside. She knows precisely what it is about. She is able, finally, to detach herself from its extravagances, and to estimate its opponents without bile. Her failure to do a volume about it leaves Untermeyer’s “The New Era in American Poetry” the best in the field. Prof. Dr. Lowes’ treatise is very much more thorough, but it has the defect of stopping with the fundamentals – it has too little to say about specific poets. Untermeyer discusses all of them, and then throws in a dozen or two orthodox bards, wholly untouched by Bolshevism, for good measure. His criticism is often trenchant and always very clear. He thinks he knows what he thinks he knows, and he states it with the utmost address – sometimes, indeed, as in the case of Pound, with a good deal more address than its essential accuracy deserves. But the messianic note that gets into the bulls and ukases of Pound himself, the profound solemnity of Miss Lowell, the windy chautauqua-like nothings of Lindsay, the contradictions of the Imagists, the puerilities of Kreymborg et al – all these things are happily absent. And so it is possible to follow him amiably even when he is palpably wrong.
That is not seldom. At the very start, for example, he permits himself a lot of highly dubious rumble-bumble about the “inherent Americanism” and soaring democracy of the movement. “Once,” he says, “the most exclusive and aristocratic of the arts, appreciated and fostered only by little salons and erudite groups, poetry has suddenly swung away from its self-imposed strictures and is expressing itself once more in terms of democracy.” Pondering excessively, I can think of nothing that would be more untrue than this. The fact is that the new poetry is neither American nor democratic. Despite its remote grounding on Whitman, it started, not in the United States at all, but in France, and its exotic color is still its most salient characteristic. Practically every one of its practitioners is palpably under some strong foreign influence, and most of them are no more Anglo-Saxon than a samovar or a toccata. The deliberate strangeness of Pound, his almost fanatical anti-Americanism, is a mere accentuation of what is in every other member of the fraternity. Many of them, like Frost, Fletcher, H. D. and Pound, have exiled themselves from the republic. Others, such as Oppenheim, Sandburg, Giovannitti, Benét and Untermeyer himself, are palpably Continental Europeans, often with Levantine traces. Yet others, such as Miss Lowell and Masters, are little more, at their best, than translators and adapters – from the French, from the Japanese, from the Greek. Even Lindsay, superficially the most national of them all, has also his exotic smear, as I have shown. Let Miss Lowell herself be a witness. “We shall see them,” she says at the opening of her essay on E. A. Robinson, “ceding more and more to the influence of other, alien, peoples….” A glance is sufficient to show the correctness of this observation. There is no more “inherent Americanism” in the new poetry than there is in the new American painting and music. It lies, in fact, quite outside the main stream of American culture.
Nor is it democratic, in any intelligible sense. The poetry of Whittier and Longfellow was democratic. It voiced the elemental emotions of the masses of the people; it was full of their simple, rubber-stamp ideas; they comprehended it and cherished it. And so with the poetry of James Whitcomb Riley, and with that of Walt Mason and Ella Wheeler Wilcox. But the new poetry, grounded firmly upon novelty of form and boldness of idea, is quite beyond their understanding. It seems to them to be idiotic, just as the poetry of Whitman seemed to them to be idiotic, and if they could summon up enough interest in it to examine it at length they would undoubtedly clamor for laws making the confection of it a felony. The mistake of Untermeyer, and of others who talk to the same effect, lies in confusing the beliefs of poets and the subject matter of their verse with its position in the national consciousness. Oppenheim, Sandburg and Lindsay are democrats, just as Whitman was a democrat, but their poetry is no more a democratic phenomenon than his was, or than, to go to music, Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony was. Many of the new poets, in truth, are ardent enemies of democracy, for example, Pound. Only one of them has ever actually sought to take his strophes to the vulgar. That one is Lindsay – and there is not the slightest doubt that the yokels welcomed him, not because they were interested in his poetry, but because it struck them as an amazing, and perhaps even a fascinatingly obscene thing, for a sane man to go about the country on any such bizarre and undemocratic business.
No sound art, in fact, could possibly be democratic. Tolstoi wrote a whole book to prove the contrary, and only succeeded in making his case absurd. The only art that is capable of reaching the Homo Boobus is art that is already debased and polluted – band music, official sculpture, Pears’ Soap painting, the popular novel. What is honest and worthy of praise in the new poetry is Greek to the general. And, despite much nonsense, it seems to me that there is no little in it that is honest and worthy of praise. It has, for one thing, made an effective war upon the cliché, and so purged the verse of the nation of much of its old banality in subject and phrase. The elegant album pieces of Richard Henry Stoddard and Edmund Clarence Stedman are no longer in fashion – save, perhaps, among the democrats that Untermeyer mentions. And in the second place, it has substituted for this ancient conventionality an eager curiosity in life as men and women are actually living it – a spirit of daring experimentation that has made poetry vivid and full of human interest, as it was in the days of Elizabeth. The thing often passes into the grotesque, it is shot through and through with héliogabalisme, but at its high points it has achieved invaluable pioneering. A new poet, emerging out of the Baptist night of Peoria or Little Rock to-day, comes into an atmosphere charged with subtle electricities. There is a stimulating restlessness; ideas have a welcome, the art he aspires to is no longer a merely formal exercise, like practicing Czerny. When a Henry Van Dyke arises at some college banquet and begins to discharge an old-fashioned ode to alma mater there is a definite snicker, it is almost as if he were to appear in Congress gaiters or a beaver hat. An audience for such things, of course, still exists. It is, no doubt, an enormously large audience. But it has changed a good deal qualitatively, if not quantitatively. The relatively civilized reader has been educated to something better. He has heard a music that has spoiled his ear for the old wheezing of the melodeon. He weeps no more over what wrung him yesteryear.
Unluckily, the new movement, in America even more than in England, France and Germany, suffers from a very crippling lack, and that is the lack of a genuinely first-rate poet. It has produced many talents, but it has yet to produce any genius, or even the shadow of genius. There has been a general lifting of the plain, but no vasty and melodramatic throwing up of new peaks. Worse still, it has had to face hard competition from without – that is, from poets who, while also emerged from platitude, have yet stood outside it, and perhaps in some doubt of it. Untermeyer discusses a number of such poets in his book. There is one of them, Lizette Woodworth Reese, who has written more sound poetry, more genuinely eloquent and beautiful poetry, than all the new poets put together – more than a whole posse of Masterses and Lindsays, more than a hundred Amy Lowells. And there are others, Neihardt and John McClure among them – particularly McClure. Untermeyer, usually anything but an ass, once committed the unforgettable asininity of sneering at McClure. The blunder, I daresay, is already lamented; it is not embalmed in his book. But it will haunt him on Tyburn Hill. For this McClure, attempting the simplest thing in the simplest way, has done it almost superbly. He seems to be entirely without theories. There is no pedagogical passion in him. He is no reformer. But more than any of the reformers now or lately in the arena, he is a poet.
23 Thursday Jan 2014
Posted in 1900s, American, Poetry, Pound (Ezra)
The Flame
by Ezra Pound
[from Canzoni, 1911]
‘Tis not a game that plays at mates and mating,
Provençe knew;
‘Tis not a game of barter, lands and houses,
Provençe knew.
We who are wise beyond your dream of wisdom,
Drink our immortal moments; we “pass through.”
We have gone forth beyond your bonds and borders,
Provençe knew;
And all the tales of Oisin say but this:
That man doth pass the net of days and hours.
Where time is shrivelled down to time’s seed corn
We of the Ever-living, in that light
Meet through our veils and whisper, and of love.
O smoke and shadow of a darkling world,
These, and the rest, and all the rest we knew.
‘Tis not a game that plays at mates and mating,
‘Tis not a game of barter, lands and houses,
‘Tis not “of days and nights” and troubling years,
Of cheeks grown sunken and glad hair gone gray;
There is the subtler music, the clear light
Where time burns back about th’ eternal embers.
We are not shut from all the thousand heavens:
Lo, there are many gods whom we have seen,
Folk of unearthly fashion, places splendid,
Bulwarks of beryl and of chrysoprase.
Sapphire Benacus, in thy mists and thee
Nature herself’s turned metaphysical,
Who can look on that blue and not believe?
Thou hooded opal, thou eternal pearl,
O thou dark secret with a shimmering floor,
Through all thy various mood I know thee mine;
If I have merged my soul, or utterly
Am solved and bound in, through aught here on earth,
There canst thou find me, O thou anxious thou,
Who call’st about my gates for some lost me;
I say my soul flowed back, became translucent.
Search not my lips, O Love, let go my hands,
This thing that moves as man is no more mortal.
If thou hast seen my shade sans character,
If thou hast seen that mirror of all moments,
That glass to all things that o’ershadow it,
Call not that mirror me, for I have slipped
Your grasp, I have eluded.
23 Thursday Jan 2014
Posted in 1800s, American, Dickinson (Emily), Poetry
I counted till they danced so
Emily Dickinson
[1858]
Their slippers leaped the town —
And then I took a pencil
To note the rebels down —
And then they grew so jolly
I did resign the prig —
And ten of my once stately toes
Are marshalled for a jig!
*
21 Tuesday Jan 2014
Posted in 1900s, American, Caldwell (Janet P), Poetry
Soiled Panties?
Janet P. Caldwell
Today . . .
I put on my big-girl panties
the first time
in such a long while.
I left my Pampers
by the way–fare–side.
The price was too high
for soulish, kiddish, skid–marks.
So, I stopped peeing myself
and hiding in the dark
from my self–induced
monsters of thought.
I forgot . . .
though the Universe. . .
keeps reminding me
of who I am.
Letting go of the stupid stuff
is as easy as 1-2-3
no need to plead
for 5 anymore.
I keep arriving . . .
horizon after horizon.
Playing on a field
more level . . .
is what I thought
that I needed.
I found this balance within me.
The imagined pain
still stirs occasionally
but I am choosing
to change my perceptions
and Be.
It’s time to show-up
grow-up
and stop the madness
of self blame
and others
for how I feel.
I love you, Tide Dancer . . . still.
And I chose it, didn’t I?
Yes, yes I did.
So, though I broke up
with myself.
I put the pieces
back together again
as only I can.
And I woke up
in due–time
to save me
this time
in lieu of the junk
found in the salvage yard.
Thank you, Universe. . .
for reminding me
and staying on my skittish ass
about who I am.
Clean panties, anyone?
Janet wrote her first poems in an old diary where she was noting her daily thoughts by the tender age of eight. Along with her thoughts and poetry she drew what she refers to as Hippie flowers. You know, the Sixties / Seventies flower power symbol of peace and love, which are a very important part of her consciousness today. Her first book, in such unassuming diaries, would never see the light of day due to an unfortunate house fire.
This did not deter her. She opted for a new batch of composition journals and filled every one. In the early 1980s, Janet held a byline in a small newspaper in Denton, Texas, while working full time, being a mother and attending night school. Since the early days Janet has been published in newspapers, magazines and books globally. She also has enjoyed being the feature on numerous occasions, in magazines and on radio. She has gone on to publish three books. 5 degrees to separation (2003), Passages (2012) and her latest book, Dancing Toward the Light . . . the journey continues (2013), published by and available at Inner Child Press, as well as at fine bookstores everywhere.
Discover more at http://www.janetcaldwell.com/.
